What is PTSD?
PTSD stands for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Special Note: Diagnoses are abstractions or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete. Also, neurobiology is a continuum; it follows that trauma is, too.
Trauma is personal and intensely private. To be traumatized is to feel a shift within you after something happened around you. According to Gabor Mate, a wondrous writer and spellbinding speaker on the conditions of being human, “Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside of you.”
The impact of trauma happens to your body and mind. To underscore this fact, a leader in the field of trauma research, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, has written a seminal book entitled “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” This book title perfectly summarizes the depth and breadth of trauma’s influence.
When your mind cannot forget what happened and you remain easily triggered by memories that should have never been made, your past becomes the problem. Interestingly, since your mind is designed to protect you from bad things happening, it remains sensitively connected to your worst memories.
Do you see the problem related to trauma?
According to Mind Rules, “Your mind only remembers what it can’t forget.” This makes sense and is easily proven. For instance, if asked, “What is 1 + 1?” You’ll answer the same way every time and do so rapidly, without consciously thinking. Beyond this neural truth, traumatic memories are challenging because of a second mind rule - “Your mind can’t forget what it doesn’t want to remember.” This explains the adhesiveness of trauma. Your memory of something you don’t want to recall sticks and is not quickly unstuck. Why? Because your mind has evolved to keep you safe and distant from bad things happening. When your mind has been exposed to the dark side of life, it becomes susceptible to detecting similar signs. In this way, your mind is trained to constantly be on the lookout for any sign of danger, threat, or suspicious activity.
The fuel that drives your traumatic memories is fear. Fear itself is your most primal emotion. Your capacity to sense fear allows you to safeguard yourself by taking avoidant and defensive actions. Sadly, when your mind is full of unwanted, easily awakened memories, needing to avoid anything and everything that fear detects may cause you to feel lost, irritable, discouraged, and isolated.
The recovery from trauma requires patience, a nurturing heart, a willingness to surround yourself with trusting people, and a type of bravery that permits you to step back into your life, even though your mind prefers you to stay home and be safe. At the risk of minimizing the challenges inherent in recovering from PTSD, it may be instructive to note that the opposite of fear is desire. Rediscovering aspects of your life you desire and putting intentional energy into experiencing the joy and beauty of possibility after trauma is a crucial step when you’re ready.
The following takeaways for healing are certainly not a complete roadmap for trauma recovery. They are suggestions that may point you in the right direction.
Act as though you believe in yourself. Then, keep practicing.
Believe in the best in yourself.
Remember what you’ve always enjoyed about life.
Find and surround yourself with kind and trusting people.
Be patient, very patient, like you’ve never done before.
Give your emotions plenty of room and remain curious about their message.
Help the passage of time by gradually stepping back into new experiences.
Please keep your eyes open and make the world prove itself to be safe.
Consider finding a trauma-informed therapist to guide your journey.
When ready, begin to begin again, but only when you’re willing and steady.
For two great sources of additional information about trauma, visit the websites of Dr. Gabor Mate and Dr. van der Kolk; you won’t be disappointed.
Press the button below to learn more about how your mind works as described in Dr. Zierk’s book, Mind Rules: Who’s in Control, You or Your Mind?